deploying a winform application using clickonce and iis fails

Question

I'm trying to deploy a winform application with IIS and ClickOnce. I can access the publish.htm page and the install even starts when I click on the provided link. However I get this error during the installation process:

• Downloading http://MyWebSiteUrl/.../Interop.SHDocVw.dll did not succceed.
• The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error.

Can anybody help me out on this ?

Thanks, Bruno

Answer 1

I found out that I needed to check "use .deploy file extension" (under properties>Publish>Options>Deployment

Answer 2

[Answering this old question because it comes up as the best match in my case and the accepted answer was of no use to me].

Background, in an IIS hosted ClickOnce scenario, the downloadable components are itemized in a manifest file at the root of the deployment (that's how you can specify a single download link and deploy all the supporting components).

I was converting a tested application from a WiX installation to a lightweight version with ClickOnce and received the HTTP 500 error without anything else in the logs. Naturally, I failed to think it through and instead found myself getting dragged down the rabbit hole on the internets, with instructions for detailed logging, magic spells, etc.

Upon more sober reflection, the problem was simple and I should have been able to tell immediately from the IIS log: a 500 followed by a 0 is shorthand for 'you're an idiot, the content isn't where you said it was' and it had almost nothing to do with ClickOnce.

I had copy/paste/edited an existing download link template in MVC that was in use for simple apps and it happened to cater to only two levels of subfolders in the manifest. When I ported a more complex project structure, I ended up leaving items in a Resources sub-sub-subfolder that looked fine in the manifest but the path was being truncated in MVC so that the related item could not be found.

Moral of the story - if you get a 500 error always check first to make sure your non-functioning appliance is plugged into a working outlet...